Top Five Things That I'm Thankful for This Year

Time to get myself in the thankful spirit with a rousing blog version of TOP FIVE THINGS. I've got my game face on and it's time to get THANKFUL AS HELL UP IN HERE.

Shamelessly stolen from my very own instagram. Deal w/ it.

My Mid-Twenties Have Begun--What Now?

This past Sunday was my birthday. I am a fresh-faced 25 year old who is ready to take on the world! It's way better than the withered and weary 24 year old that cropped up around this time last year. It's been a heck of a year and I think it calls for some serious reflection.

Taken at The Basement theatre in Atlanta. Best house lights in history.

Improv Jams and Why They're Great

Wednesday night, I was lucky enough to be part of Nashville Improv Company's most recent Improv Jam. For the uninitiated, an Improv Jam is when you perform a show and invite audience members to join you on-stage. The NIC does these as short form shows that usually run about 90 minutes. Students, prospective students, improvisers from other troupes, and frequent audience members make up our typical Jam crowd. At first blush, it seems like a lot of things could go wrong by just inviting somebody with potentially no training on stage, but a lot tends to go wrong even when have 10 year vets filling out a cast. Instead of asking what the worst that could happen, let's find out what's the best that could happen.Improv Jams rule. They are crazy fun, and I believe every troupe should have one occasionally. Here's why:

Learning to Trust

Trust: It's a pretty important thing in improv. It's a pretty important thing in life, too. It can also be very difficult to earn from and give to other people. Growing up on the internet where everything is a scam and everybody is probably lying to you, our generation is pretty rightfully wary of just trusting any schmo who asks that of them. But you know what? Trusting people feels good, man.

Polar Express Rafi wants YOU to trust your scene partners!

Teacher Post: The Benefits of Building a Blanket Fort

Gonna drop some teacher tips on you guys today! So your class is clipping along at a pretty good rate and your students are pickin' up what you're puttin down every lesson. You're blitzing through curriculum faster than you could have expected because A) you're probably a better teacher than you give yourself credit for and B) your students are geniuses who were created in laboratories. Now's the time to stop and smell the roses, but how do you do it? Sometimes it's as simple as reading stories or playing their favorite games for half an hour, but sometimes you gotta go big. You gotta build a blanket fort.

My second-in-command Callie Mattox and I finishing the Blanket Fort. The students had all jumped inside already.

Improv Game: Improv Turducken

The NIC Thanksgiving show (or T. Hanks Giving, as we call it) is coming up this Saturday and we are getting into the holiday spirit by stuffing our games with seasonal cheer. The Improv Turducken isn't a game that we slightly altered to fit a theme, but one that sprang forth in rehearsal as a twisted reminder of what happens when your improv ingenuity goes to far. It is an improv scene, stuffed with another scene, stuffed with another improv scene. It is beautiful and terrifying to behold and also sometimes covered in cranberry sauce.

Improv TurDucken: We have improv'd too deep, and too greedily.

Long Form Theme: The Dungeon Master

My improv company loves themed shows. We have had Wild West shows, Summer Camp shows , and even Pirate Musicals. Our Thanksgiving show is probably the best example of this, it's T. Hanks Giving. We all dress as Tom Hanks characters and theme our games around Tom Hanks movies, it's brilliant and dumb. When I was working on coming up with a new theme for shows I realized we hardly did anything with the fantasy genre. Then I wondered if it would be possible to improvise a D&D campaign in front of an audience and not have it be totally awkward and terrible. This is the ongoing tale of my struggle with The Dungeon Master.

Improvisers and Responsibility

Improvisers are a diverse group of people. We excel in a wide variety of things and we struggle with an incredibly broad range of deficiencies at the same time. Improv is a job that is often done for free (or very close to it) so most of us have day-jobs that we use to support our improv habits. We have families and friends outside of improv who don't understand what we mean when we say we have to go to rehearsal. I get it, fellow improvisers. It's tough to commit fully to this thing, but somebody's gotta do it.